Mayor Defends Homeless Efforts as a Carefully Coordinated Plan

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

Published: December 9, 1999

Three weeks ago, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani declared in one of his most aggressive pronouncements that the homeless had no right to sleep on the streets, and then let his police commissioner say they would be arrested if they refused to move on or seek shelter. By this week, the mayor had changed his tone, saying his policies were designed to help people help themselves, and describing his campaign to clear the homeless from sidewalks as ''compassionate'' and ''loving.''

In the mayor's mind, his classic neo-conservative, tough-love approach to the city's most desperate citizens makes sense. Asked this week at a news briefing whether a recent series of abrupt and seemingly contradictory decisions on the homeless formed a coherent policy, Mr. Giuliani briskly replied, ''Yes.'' But he added: ''I mean, they're coherent to people who have an open mind about it. They're not coherent to people who are ideologically befuddled and overwhelmed.''

Whatever his intentions, the mayor has incited a political furor, given ammunition to critics who call him mean-spirited and thrown his campaign for the United States Senate on the defensive.

He announced his new homeless policy in a politically charged climate, in response to a brutal attack on a young woman by a petty criminal thought to be homeless, and referred several times during the same remarks to a headline in The Daily News urging the city to get the ''violent crazies'' off the streets.

As a result, a policy the mayor says is intended to help the homeless has been widely seen as an attack on the homeless, and has drawn fire from Hillary Rodham Clinton, his newly combative Senate opponent, as well as a backup chorus that includes the Rev. Al Sharpton, the talk show host Rosie O'Donnell and, based on recent polls, a majority of New Yorkers.

''Great,'' the mayor responded in an interview yesterday. ''Who's setting the debate? I am. I've got them all debating my policy.''

At a news conference at Kennedy Airport yesterday, Mr. Giuliani dismissed Ms. O'Donnell and the actor Tim Robbins, who had criticized the mayor's homeless policies on Ms. O'Donnell's show earlier in the day, as part of ''the Hollywood group that is heavily associated with the Clintons.'' Although Ms. O'Donnell has rarely been mistaken for a political analyst, her show is watched by large numbers of women and her comments about the mayor have received an inordinate amount of attention in the press. On Tuesday, she said the mayor's homeless policies were ''out of control.''

The mayor now says that his homeless policy was being developed behind the scenes well before the attack with a paving stone on the young woman, Nicole Barrett, and that his announcement, made on his weekly radio call-in show, was not an impulsive reaction to a crime that shocked the city. In any case, Mr. Giuliani dismissed concerns that the timing of his announcement made his policy seem punitive. ''I don't care,'' he said. ''It was an excellent time to do it. That is when you very often can get people to understand even better why you're doing it.''

The mayor traced the genesis of his arrest policy - his advisers call it the ''outreach policy'' - to events in the late summer and early fall. It was then, the mayor said, that ''there seemed to be complaints from different communities that there was a return of more aggressive panhandling.'' Advisers frequently raised the issue at the mayor's 8 a.m. staff meeting. Joseph J. Lhota, the deputy mayor for operations, said he was seeing more homeless men during his morning walks on the Brooklyn Heights promenade, while Anthony P. Coles, the mayor's chief policy adviser, said he was seeing more on the Upper East Side.

The mayor said the Police Department then conducted two surveys of the homeless, one in late September and the other in early November. The first survey, the mayor said, showed that the reports were ''somewhat exaggerated.'' But the second survey, the mayor said, showed ''some increase.'' He would not provide specific numbers.

The second survey was consistent with what advocates for the homeless had long been saying. It also dismayed the mayor's advisers, especially since the city's 40 shelters for single adults were not full, and still are not. Clearly, people who needed shelter were not using the system. On an average night in October, for example, the shelters were used by 6,728 single adults, but had room for 7,548.

''There appears to be some level of personal inertia on their part to enter the system,'' said Mr. Lhota. Advocates for the homeless countered that the empty beds are the result of the mayor's more bureaucratic procedures at the door, which make it harder to qualify for space.

The frustrations of the mayor's advisers came only months after the city's fiscal 2000 budget had been passed, with a nearly $40 million increase for homeless services -- including money for up to six new shelters for 350 more families. Although homelessness in the city has declined from a high in the late 1980's and early 1990's, in the last two years, it has begun to creep up again, particularly among families.